The Light of Life

by Edward W. Robertson

  When Ara brought them to the field at the edge of the living land, the grass smelled of sunlight on dew. Dante's optimism for his progress was as bright as the skies, yet that day and the three that followed it passed with a dismal lack of concrete steps forward. Blays, at least, had finally gotten to the point where he was able to grapple with the stream, meaning that he was also able to join the others in the immensely frustrating business of participating in an activity very much like trying to build a sand castle as it was being washed away.

  Even Ara, who was usually happy to laugh at and casually insult them for their stupidity, grew brooding and removed. Her lack of liveliness only made Dante feel less likely to succeed. He found himself working mechanically, trying the same methods over and over, making no real efforts to vary them. He told himself he was slowly growing his skills, but he didn't know if that was true.

  Dante checked in with Jona every evening, but the sailor had nothing of particular interest. But on the fifth day after hearing that the Knight of Odo Sein had agreed to help them, Jona looned Dante during breakfast.

  Dante stood from the low table and walked to the edge of the room. "Go ahead, Jona."

  "We've just had a report from the swamps," the sailor said. "The White Lich is moving his forces to the east. The scouts believe he's on his way to a town by name of Ura Gall. That's several days away from us, but still a mite closer to Aris Osis."

  "It goes without saying to keep your eyes peeled for any signs of a ruse. Is it possible to evacuate Ura Gall?"

  "That won't be an easy thing to do, lord. If Aris Osis extends its lines to bring people down from Ura Hall, it will make them a very soft target. Too soft for the enemy to ignore, methinks."

  "I didn't mean to send Aris Osis' troops to the town. I meant to get Ura Gall's people to flee to the north."

  "But lord, that's the dead opposite direction from Aris Osis. That's a funny way to get them to safety."

  "If the White Lich goes after them, it'd buy us another week to prepare. Small price to pay to save the rest of the country."

  Jona made a thoughtful noise. "I suppose that's an easy decision to make when it's not your people on the chopping block."

  "As a matter of fact, it is an easy decision, Jona. Furthermore, if Ura Gall heads north and the White Lich heads for Aris Osis instead, then we've exposed his ruse and removed the people of Ura Gall from harm's way. Something to think about as you're galloping around on your high horse."

  "I was only thinking, sir. But that tends to be a mistake, don't it?"

  "Have the scouts gotten an estimate on the number of Blighted?"

  "Hard to say, given that they like to travel beneath the water, and also to rip apart anyone who gets close enough to count them. But they say it can't be anything less than five thousand. Mayhaps twice that."

  Dante swore. "That was not the news I wanted."

  "Should I go back and change it, lord?"

  "It's all right. Raw numbers don't really matter. All that matters is the lich, and we still have a way to hit him."

  He ended the conversation, then informed Ara and the others that they'd soon know whether there was an impending attack on Aris Osis. The idea that things were coming to a head helped Dante pursue the stream with renewed vigor, but by day's end, he still couldn't get two of the three sequences to stay open at the same time.

  That night, long after they'd snuffed the candle and rolled into bed, the door to the room slipped open. Dante snapped open his eyes. A tall silhouette stood in the doorway.

  "Get up," Ara said softly. "Don't make any noise. No lights, either."

  Dante disengaged himself from the wicker frame, which was happy to dump you from it if you moved too fast. Blays and Gladdic were already stirring, but Volo was sleeping with typical teen vigorousness and had to be rousted with a good shake.

  Ara wasn't carrying a lantern and the stairwell was so dim they had to feel their way down it until their eyes adjusted. Reaching the ground floor, she stopped to listen, then continued to the doorway.

  Dante had spent very little time outside the towers after dark. A gentle wind blew in the heat of the captured sunlight that continued to be released from the mostly black Hills. The wind was blowing out of the northwest and Ara led them in the exact opposite direction, stopping at the last line of trees before the ground gave way to the warped nakedness of the Hills.

  "I always think they look spooky at night," she said. "Like anything could come out of them."

  Blays squinted into the darkness, the wind ruffling his blond hair. "I hadn't had that thought, but thank you for infecting me with it."

  "Sit down. All of you. And get comfortable. We're going to be here for a while."

  Dante lowered himself to the grass. It was dewy and cool. "What's this about? Now we need to practice in our sleep, too?"

  "If you're going to get mad about this, you'll have to curse yourself, you dunce. I'm giving you exactly what you asked for: the first history of the Odo Sein." Ara plucked annoyedly at her robe. "We never reveal this until the night before a student is to be knighted and bestowed with their sword. But you're about to fight for us, and you might be about to die for us, and there's a small chance you might even win for us. So it stands to reason that you deserve to know who we are—and what you have become a part of."

  She lifted her eyebrows. "Although it goes without saying that if you tell any of the other Bels that I told you this, it'll be a race to see whether they can kill you before I get to."

  "Duly noted," Blays said.

  "The story that most people know is that the Odo Sein were founded to put down the sorcerers and warlocks who were attempting to overthrow our rulers. But this is only partly true. It's like pointing to the base of a tree and saying that it grew from its roots. In a limited way, that's so—but you're forgetting all about the seed.

  "Our seed dropped a few hundred years before the Eiden Rane. We're not sure exactly how long, because we didn't and still don't have physical records, and there's lots that's been lost in the chaos. What's important is that among the Yosein, there was a man named Shan Way. As a boy, he heard tales of the Arnad. Fierce nomads of what are now the Alebolgian prairies, the Arnad had disappeared a century before Shan's birth. Nobody knew why or where they'd gone. This, along with their prowess in battle, made Shan obsessed. He pestered all the adults he knew for stories of the Arnad, and when he played with his friends, he made them play as the barbarian nomads.

  "Most childhood interests fall aside with age. Shan's didn't. As soon as he was old enough, he descended from the hills and into the prairies, visiting the villages the Arnad had burned, raped, and defiled over the years. There, he collected more stories of the Arnad. As many as he could. Where there were books or scrolls, he got those too, buying what he could and stealing the rest.

  "His studies went on for years. He used to earn money by going to the squares and inns to tell the best stories he'd found. Soon, he was composing his own historical works on the Arnad. His interest in them was him. Yet despite everything he'd learned, he still hadn't figured out why the people of his obsession had disappeared.

  "Finally, long after any sane man would have given up, he heard a story that the Arnad had disappeared into the Hitchcrag Mountains for reasons unknown. He set out on a pilgrimage into the mountains. Alone, because he was crazy. As he traveled, he imagined the path the Arnad had taken, all the reasons they might have left the plains, what he'd say to them if he found them. Within a few days, he'd gotten lost. As he tried to find a path back out, he stumbled into a shaded valley. Bones littered the ground. Half buried and covered in moss. Most of the clothes had rotted away, but Shan recognized their long knives at once. He had found the Arnad.

  "Puzzled as to what had slaughtered such mighty warriors, he examined countless skeletons. Searched their effects for scrolls, especially those with orders from their chiefs, or communications from afar. Picked his way across the valley. Assembling the pieces like a mosaic, h
e put together a theory: the Arnad's shaman had had a vision that if they stayed on the prairie, their people would be wiped out. Not being fans of extinction, they headed into the Hitchcrags. Seeking sanctuary. Instead, they found death. Why? Shan ran through one possibility after another, envisioning how the Arnad must have been taken by surprise, pushed to one side of the valley, induced to make their last stand, and die.

  "In the middle of his imagining this, something remarkable happened: Shan was given a Glimpse. He was there as the Arnad entered the valley. He watched as they were ambushed by a combined army of furious plains-dwellers. He saw the last of the Arnad fall. And he witnessed as a shaman in wolf furs hiked up a ridge to receive the rewards of his betrayal: three pouches of silver, and the hand of the firstborn daughter of the enemy king."

  Seated in the grass, Ara tipped back her head and gazed up at the stars. "Shan was gobsmacked by what he'd seen. Understanding at once how and why he'd been granted the Glimpse, he remained in the valley, trying to attain another sip of the nectar of the past. Two weeks later, his wish was finally granted.

  "But the Glimpse wasn't of the Arnad. Or of their foes. It was of a man and his pregnant wife crossing the valley in winter. They were dressed in buckskins, and though the stitching was skillful, the style looked older than anything Shan had seen. As the two of them climbed a ridge, the woman slipped in the snow. The man grabbed her hand and pulled her to safety, but lost his balance, tumbling down the slope to his death. Knowing there was nothing she could do, the woman trudged on. Shan didn't see whether she'd made it before the vision ended.

  "Shan had finally found the Arnad. But he left the valley with a much deeper revelation: the past could be had again. Finding it became his new obsession. As he traveled and studied and practiced, he found that he didn't need to know everything about a people to catch a Glimpse of them. He only needed to think so fully about who they might have been that a gate would open to show them as they truly were.

  "Shan saw the people who would become the Yosein as war pushed them from the Alebolgian coast and into the hills. He saw the Tracians, who built intricate earthen mounds only to pull them down a dozen years later, as if disgusted with their own work. He saw the Natyans, the forgemasters who brought us iron from the rusty hills.

  "Each sight let Shan envision what led up to that sight. Letting him skip further and further back. He was now seeing people who had been completely forgotten. People he'd never heard of before. He saw people who rode horses without saddles. Then others who didn't know seem to know how to farm, following the herds and streams with the seasons. Then others who wore furs and chipped arrowheads from rocks. At one Glimpse, he saw a young boy summon a sphere of darkness. As he looked at it in wonder, the others of his tribe ran up behind him with rocks and beat him to death.

  "Then something changed. Before, the cities had been gone, but people were still plentiful. Now, there were almost none of them at all. The few Shan could find hid high in the mountains or in the deepest forests, living in the crudest savagery imaginable. He felt himself skipping more and more years with each Glimpse, but he had no idea how much time was passing. Only that at night, the stars were no longer where they should be, and that the beasts who roamed the prairies were bigger and more terrible than anything he'd ever seen.

  "Then came a jump much longer than any before. One that made his head spin and his stomach drop. When the Glimpse resolved, what Shan saw nearly stopped his heart. Grand castles. Towering spires. Aqueducts that soaring down from the mountains. All of it was bigger and more beautiful than anything Shan had ever imagined. The people were tall and sleek and rode around on proud horses. The streets were so clean they dazzled. Markets sold food and goods that had to have come from every corner of the world.

  "The Glimpse expanded further. Shan saw wizards wielding the light and shadow to raise immense monuments and dizzying towers to themselves. Others sat in finished spires reading their tomes. Each one had their own tower where they studied their art and performed subtle experiments while hundreds of guards and servants tended to the needs of the tower. They had made the realm. And they had made it great."

  Ara paused to slip a waterskin from her robe and take a long drink. She cleared her throat and resumed. "The Glimpse moved away from the towers and into a darker mode. Shan watched as thousands of slaves worked the fields outside the city. Women whose minds had been hollowed out by sorcery swept and scrubbed the streets, collecting buckets of shit with grins on their faces. Men hacked blocks of stone from the hills, straining until they collapsed. For every person who lived well, four lived in agony. Kept in place by the unbreakable power of the warlocks and the twisted creatures they'd shaped to enforce their laws.

  "Shan saw at last that the aching beauty of the realm was only made possible by an even greater horror.

  "The sights afforded him by the vision began to speed up. Grim men and women worked in secret with a gold substance that glimmered on the air, hiding their activities from the wizards. In Shan's next sight, the people marched openly on the fields and quarries, freeing the slaves to join their ranks in rebellion. Time slid forward and the nether and ether were leaping through the streets of the cities, slaughtering the rebels by the tens of thousands. But those who bore the Golden Stream wrested the dark powers away from the warlocks. With the sorcerers reduced to mortal men, the rebels rushed in to string them from the rafters by their own guts.

  "The sorcerers resorted to blasting whole neighborhoods into flattened rubble, clearing the way so that the wielders of the stream couldn't sneak up on their towers without being seen. Unchecked fires tore across the cities. Battles raged in the fields. Until everything that could be burned was burned. One after another, the sorcerer's towers were ripped down, the sorcerers bludgeoned into meat and fed to the dogs.

  "The Glimpse slipped forward again. In one city, half the towers had fallen. Most of its districts lay in ruin. From the bases of the remaining towers, demons and monsters raced forth, carving through the mobs. Another slip and the demons were dead but human corpses layered the streets like autumn leaves. The skies were black with ash and the soot of the bodies.

  "What was left of the rebels marched on the towers. Protected by the bearers of the stream, they pulled the warlocks down to earth. Only five towers stood between the people and their freedom. Then four. Then three. As the rebels moved to the third-to-last tower, its door swung open before they could attack it.

  "A pack of abominations bounded out and scythed into the mobs. Not human. Not demon. Not dead. But some measure of all three. And when they killed you—if they didn't eat you, or jam one claw up your ribs, another down your pelvis, and rip you in half—you became one of them. And when the entire mob lay dead or stood converted, and every soul in the city had been taken, the beasts returned to the towers and ate the very sorcerers who'd made them.

  "The abominations spread faster than the news of them. Those places untouched by the war were gutted in a matter of days. Riders raced to rally people against the menace, but the resistance was overwhelmed before it could form. The survivors fled into the high mountains and deep wilderness. Only a few thousand scattered people withdrew far enough to hide. Everyone else was killed or absorbed.

  "Until the abominations were all that remained on the earth.

  "Even without humans to feed on, it took a long time for them to die. Hundreds of years, perhaps, although since they built nothing and grew nothing, the Glimpse gave Shan little indication of time. Eventually, the last of them passed. Even then, the people huddled in the peaks and jungles. Centuries later, when they finally emerged from their holes to see what had come of the world, the people were dressed in skins and carrying spears tipped with bone and rock.

  "At last, Shan was released from what he would call the Long Glimpse. He was so horrified by what he'd seen that he didn't move for three days. When he stirred at last, a single thought rang in his mind. Sorcery had destroyed the world. A much better world than his own
. And it was only a matter of time until it did so again. Worse yet—some day, it would destroy everything. All people. All beasts. All trees and fields and flowers.

  "But he knew a way to fight it. The Golden Stream. Shan spent twenty years searching for it, guided only by what little he'd seen during the nightmare of his Long Glimpse. He was an old man before he finally found it and learned to harness it. Before he died, he taught it to three disciples. Three disciples who would watch sorcery spread across Tanar Atain—and who would found the order of the Odo Sein to combat it."

  Ara bowed her head. She looked exhausted by the tale, as if the telling had taken a lifetime. The others exchanged a series of glances as complicated as semaphore.

  "Okay, I'll say it," Blays said. "Isn't this utterly crazy?"

  Ara looked up, a hard glint in her eye. "You're calling our history crazy?"

  "First off, a man with no otherworldly training whatsoever was so obsessed with a gang of long-dead horsemen that he conjured up a heretofore-unknown form of sorcery. Except it wasn't truly unknown, because as it turns out, thousands of years before that, another group of anti-sorcerers deployed that same power against their slavemasters in a war that destroyed the world."

  "Wrong. It wasn't thousands of years ago. It was tens of thousands."

  "Well that makes it much more believable!"

  "Shan was given Glimpses. Unlike people, Glimpses don't lie."

  "Was Shan a person?"

  "What else would he be? A jumble of cats walking around in a human skin?"

  "If Shan was a person, and people lie, then maybe he lied about the Glimpses."

  Ara gave him a disgusted look. "Do you people use this same scrutiny on your hopelessly complicated religions?"

  "Of course not," Gladdic said. "For they are ours. And if you deny them, the powers that be send people like me to correct you."

  Dante brushed what he hoped was a beetle from his foot. "You may think our beliefs are ridiculous, but I don't see how yours are ironclad. Shan could have made all of it up. Or more likely, he really did discover the Odo Sein, and his disciples invented a fabulous history for him in order to lend your order more credence."